Get the view from the inside. Every week, Graham Smith (ex-Ares) and Deborah Taylor (ex-Barclays) take a look at Wall Street’s headline-grabbing deals.
From mega-mergers and hostile takeovers to complex private credit transactions, they break down the why, the how, and the who behind the numbers.
Investment Banking Valuation Methods Explained (Valuing Apple with Claude)
This week Debs and Graham take on the football field, the valuation summary page that goes into almost every investment banking pitch book. Claude Opus 5.5 built one for Apple, covering trading comps, precedent transactions, a DCF, a DCF with synergies, an LBO analysis and the 52-week trading range, with the supporting analysis behind each bar. The chart raises the question the episode turns on. Apple's share price of $341, at the top of its 52-week range, sits above every methodology...
24 Sept 2026
Did Claude Just Replace the Equity Research Analyst?
This week Debs gives Claude a job she did for years at Barclays: write an equity research note on a company of its choosing. It picked Chipotle. Its first pass came back neutral with an equal weight rating, so Debs pushed it to take a view. The result is a sell rating, a $28.50 target price on a $33.68 share price and a note titled Guac is Extra. Debs walks through the note the way a research desk would. The front page is the only part most clients read, so the rating, target price, dow...
17 Sept 2026
Can Anthropic's Claude Build Its Own $2 Trillion IPO Roadshow Deck?
This week Graham and Debs take on Anthropic's IPO, the offering investors are projecting at around $2 trillion on a reported $100bn raise, with pricing expected before the US midterms. No S-1 yet, so no official financials, but the roadshow is coming, and the pair asked two frontier models to draft the roadshow presentation from public information alone: Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, same prompt. The result surprised both of them. Graham's verdict, before either deck is on screen, i...
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.0 / 5
8 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
12 ratings
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